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Articles 31 - 39 of 39

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Innocence Effect, Avishalom Tor, Oren Gazal-Ayal Jan 2012

The Innocence Effect, Avishalom Tor, Oren Gazal-Ayal

Journal Articles

Nearly all felony convictions - about 95 percent - follow guilty pleas, suggesting that plea offers are very attractive to defendants compared to trials. Some scholars argue that plea bargains are too attractive and should be curtailed because they facilitate the wrongful conviction of innocents. Others contend that plea bargains only benefit innocent defendants, providing an alternative to the risk of a harsher sentence at trial. Hence, even while heatedly disputing their desirability, both camps in the debate believe that plea bargains commonly lead innocents to plead guilty. This Article shows, however, that the belief that innocents routinely plead guilty …


Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, And Urban Neighborhoods, Margaret F. Brinig, Nicole Stelle Garnett Jan 2012

Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, And Urban Neighborhoods, Margaret F. Brinig, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

This paper addresses implications for urban neighborhoods of two dramatic shifts in the American educational landscape: (1) the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods, and (2) the rise of charter schools. In previous studies, we linked Catholic school closures to increased disorder and crime, and decreased social cohesion, in Chicago neighborhoods. This paper turns to two questions unanswered in our previous investigations. First, because we focused exclusively on school closures in our previous studies, we were uncertain whether our results reflected the work that open Catholic schools do as neighborhood institutions or whether we were finding a “loss …


Is Pepsi Really A Substitute For Coke? Market Definition In Antitrust And Ip, Mark Mckenna Jan 2012

Is Pepsi Really A Substitute For Coke? Market Definition In Antitrust And Ip, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

Antitrust law explicitly depends on market definition. Many issues in IP law also depend on market definition, though that definition is rarely explicit. Applying antitrust traditional market definition to IP goods leads to some startling results. Despite the received wisdom that IP rights don't necessarily confer market power, a wide array of IP rights do exactly that under traditional antitrust principles. This result requires us to rethink both the overly-rigid way we define markets in antitrust law and the competitive consequences of granting IP protection. Both antitrust and IP must begin to think realistically about those consequences, rather than falling …


Dastar's Next Stand, Mark Mckenna Jan 2012

Dastar's Next Stand, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

A series of recent cases implicate the extent to which trademark law can be used to control creative content. The possibility of using trademark law for that purpose obviously creates a potential conflict with copyright law, which ordinarily sets the rules for use of creative material developed by others. Unfortunately, despite its attraction to boundary questions in trademark law, the Supreme Court‘s Dastar decision—its lone decision demarcating trademark and copyright law—remains controversial and its scope somewhat unclear. This Essay argues that Dastar should be understood, or at least should be extended, to rule out any claims based on confusion that …


(Dys)Functionality, Mark Mckenna Jan 2012

(Dys)Functionality, Mark Mckenna

Journal Articles

The functionality doctrine serves a unique role in trademark law: unlike virtually every other doctrine, functionality can trump consumer confusion (or so it seems, at least in mechanical-functionality cases). In this sense, functionality may be the only doctrine in trademark law that can truly be considered a defense. But despite its potential power, the functionality doctrine is quite inconsistently applied. This is true of mechanical functionality cases because courts differ over the extent to which the doctrine focuses on competitors’ right to copy unpatented features as opposed to their need to copy. And aesthetic functionality cases are even more scattered: …


Child Support Guidelines And Divorce Incentives, Margaret F. Brinig, Douglas W. Allen Jan 2012

Child Support Guidelines And Divorce Incentives, Margaret F. Brinig, Douglas W. Allen

Journal Articles

A child support guideline is a formula used to calculate support payments based on a few family characteristics. Guidelines began replacing court awarded support payments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and were eventually mandated by the federal government in 1988. Two fundamentally different types of guidelines are used: percentage of obligor income, and income shares models. This paper explores the incentives to divorce under the two schemes, and uses the NLSY data set to test the key predictions. We find that percentage of obligor income models are destabilizing for some families with high incomes. This may explain why …


Nonprofits, Politics, And Privacy, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer Jan 2012

Nonprofits, Politics, And Privacy, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

The first Part of this Article briefly reviews and contrasts the history and current rules governing disclosure and privacy in the federal tax, federal tax exemption, and federal election law contexts. This review reveals that both the cost-benefit approach and the right-to-privacy approach can be found in this history, but to a greater or lesser extent depending on the context. The second Part explores these two different approaches and the extent to which the existing disclosure rules reflect those approaches. This Part shows that the rules are sometimes but not always based both on the cost-benefit approach to disclosure, in …


Free Speech And Parity: A Theory Of Public Employee Rights, Randy J. Kozel Jan 2012

Free Speech And Parity: A Theory Of Public Employee Rights, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

More than four decades have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court revolutionized the First Amendment rights of the public workforce. In the ensuing years the Court has embarked upon an ambitious quest to protect expressive liberties while facilitating orderly and efficient government. Yet it has never articulated an adequate theoretical framework to guide its jurisprudence. This Article suggests a conceptual reorientation of the modern doctrine. The proposal flows naturally from the Court’s rejection of its former view that one who accepts a government job has no constitutional right to complain about its conditions. As a result of that rejection, the …


The Role Of Aspiration In Corporate Fiduciary Duties, Julian Velasco Jan 2012

The Role Of Aspiration In Corporate Fiduciary Duties, Julian Velasco

Journal Articles

Corporate law is characterized by a pervasive divergence between standards of conduct and standards of review. Courts often opine on the relatively demanding standard of conduct, but their judgements must be based on the more forgiving standard of review. Commentators defend this state of affairs by insisting that it provides guidance to directors without imposing ruinous liability. However, the dichotomy can lead many, especially those who focus on the bottom line, to call into question the meaningfulness of standards of conduct. Of particular concern is the increasing popularity, in legal and scholarly circles, of the notion that fiduciary duty standards …